Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations

Air trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere.</jats:p

1. Improving the Yield of Biodiesel from Microalgae and Other Lipids. 2. Studies of the Wax Ester Biosynthetic Pathway and Potential Biotechnological Application

The production of biofuels and oleochemicals from renewable sources offers an opportunity to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The work contained in this dissertation has focused on developing and improving methods for the production of biodiesel from non-traditional feedstocks and understanding biosynthetic pathways that result in the production of oleochemicals and fuels. Pure vegetable oil can account for 70-80% of the total cost of biodiesel production. Many low-cost oils contain high amounts of free fatty acids, which are unsuitable for base-catalyzed transesterification. Herein an approach is described that efficiently accomplishes the simultaneous esterification and transesterification of both free fatty acids and triglycerides found in low-cost oils. The approach utilizes an acid catalyst and longer-chain alcohols to improve biodiesel yields from oils high in free fatty acids. Microalgae are a promising biodiesel feedstock, due to its high lipid productivity and its ability to be cultivated using resources, land and water, unsuitable for agriculture. As part of this work, reaction conditions were optimized for the direct (or in situ) transesterification of algal biomass to biodiesel. This approach accomplishes the simultaneous extraction and conversion of the total lipids from microalgae and results in increased yields compared to extraction followed by conversion. The use of this process to effectively produce biodiesel from wet algal biomass is also discussed. Wax esters are a class of oleochemicals that can be used for a wide range of applications in diverse industries. The chemical composition of native wax esters from the bacterium Marinobacter aquaeolei was determined. It was found that including small alcohols in the growth medium resulted in the in vivo formation of esters similar to biodiesel. All of the proteins involved in the wax ester biosynthetic pathway are not known. The cloning, purification, and characterization of a putative fatty aldehyde reductase from M. aquaeolei, believed to be involved in the production of wax esters, is reported. Finally, the expression of a ws/dgat (wax ester synthase) gene from M. aquaeolei in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 is discussed as an approach to producing biodiesel in vivo from sunlight and CO2

Solitary gravity water waves with an arbitrary distribution of vorticity

This paper presents an existence theory for small-amplitude solitary-wave solutions to the classical water-wave problem in the absence of surface tension and with an arbitrary distribution of vorticity. The hydrodynamic problem is formulated as an in nite-dimensional Hamiltonian system in which the horizontal spatial direction is the time-like variable. A centre-manifold reduction technique is employed to reduce the system to a locally equivalent Hamiltonian system with one degree of freedom. The phase portrait of the reduced system contains a homoclinic orbit, and the corresponding solution of the water-wave problem is a solitary wave of elevation

Spatial dynamics methods for solitary gravity-capillary water waves with an arbitrary distribution of vorticity

This paper presents existence theories for several families of small-amplitude solitarywave solutions to the classical water-wave problem in the presence of surface tension and with an arbitrary distribution of vorticity. Moreover, the established local bifurcation diagram for irrotational solitary waves is shown to remain qualitatively unchanged for any choice of vorticity distribution. The hydrodynamic problem is formulated as an infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian system in which the horizontal spatial direction is the time-like variable. A centre-manifold reduction technique is employed to reduce the system to a locally equivalent Hamiltonian system with a finite numer of degrees of freedom. Homoclinic solutions to the reduced system, which correspond to solitary water waves, are detected by a variety of dynamical systems methods

Holocene carbon-cycle dynamics based on CO2 trapped in ice at Taylor Dome, Antarctica

A high-resolution ice-core record of atmospheric CO2 concentration over the Holocene epoch shows that the global carbon cycle has not been in steady state during the past 11,000 years. Analysis of the CO2 concentration and carbon stable-isotope records, using a one-dimensional carbon-cycle model,uggests that changes in terrestrial biomass and sea surface temperature were largely responsible for the observed millennial-scale changes of atmospheric CO2 concentrations

The CO\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3e Concentration of Air Trapped in Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 Ice Formed During Periods of Rapid Climate Change

The CO2 content of air occluded in Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice formed over two separate intervals of rapidly changing climate, centered at approximately 46 and 63 kyr B. P., is as much as 90 ppm more during warm periods (interstadials) than during cold periods (stadials). These CO2 variations are superimposed on changes in annual layer thickness and δ18O of the ice and do not show the 200- to 700-year offsets which would be expected for concurrent variations in the atmosphere and the ice. The CO2 concentrations during the stadials are similar to the atmospheric values recorded by Antarctic ice of the same age, so processes occurring in the ice after bubble enclosure must be enriching the air trapped in GISP2 ice formed during the interstadials. This conclusion is supported by Ca content and electrical conductivity measurements of the ice, which show that adequate carbonate is present to produce these enrichments and that CO2 content is high only when the electrical conductivity (a proxy for H+ concentration) is high. High-resolution mapping of one 4-cm section of ice shows a 200-ppm increase in the CO2 content of the trapped air, from approximately 275 to 475 ppm. Analyses of the total inorganic carbon of ice from both the LGM and Holocene show that most of the Ca in the ice is from CaCO3 and that the δ13CO2 approaches that of soil and marine carbonates. These results show that the CO2 record preserved in ice can be altered by in situ decarbonation reactions and that only ice containing either abundant carbonate or essentially no carbonate contains a reliable record of paleoatmospheric CO2

On the particle paths and the stagnation points in small-amplitude deep-water waves

In order to obtain quite precise information about the shape of the particle paths below small-amplitude gravity waves travelling on irrotational deep water, analytic solutions of the nonlinear differential equation system describing the particle motion are provided. All these solutions are not closed curves. Some particle trajectories are peakon-like, others can be expressed with the aid of the Jacobi elliptic functions or with the aid of the hyperelliptic functions. Remarks on the stagnation points of the small-amplitude irrotational deep-water waves are also made.Comment: to appear in J. Math. Fluid Mech. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1106.382

Nonlinear interfacial waves in a constant-vorticity planar flow over variable depth

Exact Lagrangian in compact form is derived for planar internal waves in a two-fluid system with a relatively small density jump (the Boussinesq limit taking place in real oceanic conditions), in the presence of a background shear current of constant vorticity, and over arbitrary bottom profile. Long-wave asymptotic approximations of higher orders are derived from the exact Hamiltonian functional in a remarkably simple way, for two different parametrizations of the interface shape.Comment: revtex, 4.5 pages, minor corrections, summary added, accepted to JETP Letter